Emergent Dharma

Evolution is not simply birth/death, as in the classical, cyclic model of samsara. Evolution is something coming out of no-thing and then developing through time, and once we're aware of this everything changes in a significant way. Not only the material universe, but also our life-forms, our spirituality, and everything in the range of dependent co-arising, including all forms of natural perception and all levels of cultural complexity, have developed through time.

This means that, instead of having one cyclic model of samsara (worldly or laukika pratityasamutpada) and another unfolding model of liberation (transcendent or lokuttara pratityasamutpada), we need to recognize the unfolding in the world-process itself, an unfolding which allows a much deeper integration of the two models in a post-metaphysical manner.

So, basically dharmas don't simply arise - though they appear to simply arise when observed phenomenologically from a 1st person position - they arise in a developmental space. And, in 13.7 billion years of this cosmic evolution, not all dharmas have arisen simultaneously. At the beginning of this story, there were no sentient beings to be reborn and no five skandhas to start with. And so starts the recalibration of abhidharma to embrace and acknowledge a perspective-based, instead of a phenomena-based, evolutionary reality.